Dance Lesson: A Poem

And I felt then the easing away of the dance,
the not knowing a lien against,
you giving in to my giving up,
and the battle for the samba lost.

We will dance the fox trot like old people, then,
you said,
your feet suddenly sunk into a clobber pose
and your lips pulled in over your teeth.
Remorse was the mood:
yours, mine,
the victims we make of ourselves.

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Jean and Iryna are Dancing: Beth Kephart Poem

And the music is.
And the music is
how Iryna hears it,
how she won’t let it down to the floor
on the power
of its own acquiesce.
How she says
the battering beat is my bones,
it is the affectation of want
over repose,
and by the way,
I will be late, and that will be song.
Take it apart.
Say it again.
The music is
how the one snow thread
of Iryna’s snow dress
snaps,
how it melts,
how it is always Jean’s,
alone.

(I did not take this photograph of this gorgeous and talented couple; it was taken of them at a recent competition in Boston, where they captured the attention of the judges and the fans in major fashion, as they always do. They are on their way. You can see why.)

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Ledge: Beth Kephart Poem

The strange knowing between us.
The thin line of nothing
that is the listen,
thigh to thigh.
The untelling of song and the sun
that falls shy.
I am not my age.
I am not who I have been,
or I should say:
Dance is hardly archeological.
It is now, then gone.
It is the hard, soft heart of remembering
when: I moved, I was moved
by the untelling of song.

Sun on the ledge.

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The Dance Lesson: Beth Kephart Poem

You will never be;

you won’t.

Your spine, your face, your hips
are implicated, wrong.
Your balance, meanwhile, is an obstruction to mine
and cricked to a shim.
You have snaggled you have shammed you have embargoed beauty.
You have yelped the discontinuous, and why
would you ever
(answer this)
heel the music
into breaking its own heart?

It was your suspicion of tension
that failed you.
It was your wanting
too much
that forced
the first elision.
The second
erupted from despair.

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At the Dance Studio/Beth Kephart Poem

You are not, he said,
using your hands.
You are not
in the glass in the shadow:
There.
Here.
Hands being the verbs.
Verbs being the story.

Later I slept beneath
the umbrella arch of the rescued calla
underwinging reach.

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